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INSIDE ART; A Prize That Prickles

When the Tate Gallery in London announces the winner of the coveted Turner Prize each November, the art world finds something to grouse about.

This year the winner of the $32,000 award, given annually to an artist under 50 working in Britain, is Wolfgang Tillmans, the 32-year-old German-born photographer. Mr. Tillmans began his career as a fashion photographer documenting street culture, gay life and London's club scene for magazines like The Face and ID. His work now includes quirky, soulful portraits as well as evocative images, and his installations incorporate tiny snapshots alongside poster-size work taped up and down walls.

The fact that photography is particularly hot this year helped reinforce the belief that the prize focuses on the trendy. Some critics complained that Mr. Tillmans's work should not be considered an art; others disagreed and praised his unusual images.

Criticism is inevitable. The prize was attacked one year for excluding women among its finalists and another year for including only women. One year it was criticized for neglecting paintings in favor of video.

This year's finalists, three men and one woman, included two painters; three of the four artists were not British-born. The other finalists were Glenn Brown, a photorealist painter and the only native Briton; Michael Raedecker, a Dutch-born painter whose work incorporates thread and embroidery; and Tomoko Takahashi, a Japanese-born artist whose sprawling installations use detritus and snapshots.

''As the art world keeps getting more international, so does the prize,'' said Sir Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate. ''Three of the artists are working in this country but were born elsewhere. That's quite significant. Britain is now regarded as a place artists like to work.''

Sir Nicholas said the choice of Mr. Tillmans reflected the jury's admiration for ''the subtle way he manipulates images.''

Every year the Tate organizes an exhibition of the finalists' work. This year's display, which opened at Tate Britain at Millbank in October, is expected to have 90,000 visitors by the time it closes on Jan. 14. Last year's exhibition, which featured a bed by the artist Tracey Emin that displayed used condoms, soiled underwear and liquor bottles from the four days she spent on it, had 120,000 visitors, but ran three weeks longer than this year's show will.

Picasso Suit Dismissed

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art filed suit in California Superior Court in April against the trustees of the Madeleine Haas Russell Revocable Trust over an attempt to buy a 1932 Picasso. This week, Judge David A. Garcia dismissed the lawsuit, saying in court papers that ''the court finds there is no triable issue of material fact.''

The trust was founded in 1983 by Mrs. Russell, a great-grandniece of Levi Strauss and one of San Francisco's most important philanthropists as well as a museum trustee. She died last year at 84.

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In September 1999, the trust entered into an oral agreement to sell Picasso's ''Nude on a Black Armchair,'' a portrait of his mistress Marie-Therese Walter, for $44 million to the museum. Charles and Helen Schwab, museum trustees who were not involved in the suit, agreed to give the museum 40 percent of the painting's price. They were also prepared to pay the rest and leave their share in the artwork to the museum upon their deaths.

But Russell's children, who oversee the trust, decided instead to sell the painting at Christie's on Nov. 9, 1999. Leslie H. Wexner, chairman of the Limited, bought it for $41 million, $3 million less than the museum and the Schwabs were willing to pay. At the time the suit was filed, lawyers for the trust said that they had decided to sell the Picasso at auction because they didn't like the museum's plan to share the painting with the Schwabs. If the museum really wanted the painting, they said, it could have bid for it at the auction.

But the museum, contending that the trust breached its agreement, went to court seeking damages of $18 million, or 40 percent of what experts considered the fair market value of the painting.

The court sided with the trust, saying ''that the buyer made no attempt to participate in the auction and bid on the painting'' and that failure to do so ''constitutes a failure to mitigate its alleged consequential damages.''

The museum issued a statement saying, ''While the museum's outside counsel and board of trustees respectfully disagree with Judge Garcia's ruling, we feel it is in the best interest of SFMOMA and the community not to appeal his decision.''

A 'Paradise' Gained

The National Gallery of Art in Washington bought its second work by John La Farge this week. ''The Last Valley -- Paradise Rocks'' (1867), an early landscape by this American master, was sold on Wednesday at Christie's for $2 million. It was bought in memory of Gaillard F. Ravenel, the gallery's chief exhibition designer, who died four years ago, and his wife, Frances Smyth-Ravenel, who died in August.

''It's one of the earliest plein-air landscapes in American art,'' said Earl A. Powell III, the gallery's director. He described it as ''a forerunner of American Impressionism done at a time when La Farge turned his back on the Hudson River School.''

Time for van Gogh

Because of the popularity of ''Van Gogh: Face to Face,'' the Philadelphia Museum of Art has extended its schedule by more than 100 hours; the museum expects that 300,000 or more visitors will have seen the show by the time it closes on Jan. 14.

The museum will stay open until 8:45 p.m. on Fridays and on some other days during the run and open on two Mondays, Jan. 1, 2001, from noon to 5 p.m., and Jan. 8, from 2 to 8:45 p.m. Tickets for the exhibition may be bought at the museum; by telephone, at (215) 235-7469; or online at www.philamuseum.org.